It does if you enhance.I'm hazarding a guess here that the CIA or whoever investigated this had access to a better version of the recording than ogrish.
Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.KSM is a deeply disturbed psychopath who needs to be in jail for his whole life. But torturing him not only ruined the option to legally and justly convict him for his crimes, but made the moral distinction between his solution to solve external threats and our solution disappear altogether.
On the day that he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. However, he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.
Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)
The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.
In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.
The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces. -NYT 2005
KSM is a deeply disturbed psychopath who needs to be in jail for his whole life. But torturing him not only ruined the option to legally and justly convict him for his crimes, but made the moral distinction between his solution to solve external threats and our solution disappear altogether.Amen.
When a judge sentences, he commits a defendant to the custody -- in the United States he says, 'I commit to the custody of the Attorney General of the United States' -- et cetera. Here I suppose he says, I commit to the custody of the Commandant, or the Secretary of State, or whatever ... I will not do it. Not under these circumstances. ...posted by eriko at 8:24 PM on January 20, 2011 [7 favorites]
I sentence this defendant to time served. You ... are a free man right now."
I am not surprised that you are unfamiliar with the importance of substantive due process of law.The argument is that any statements he made after being tortured can't be used against him.This is not a legal doctrine I've ever heard of in my years of practice.
So, the Taliban can get off because gee we didn't know they were going to do that, but yes we did know they were training terrorists in our country and gee we knew that they had attacked the US before and all that, but we had no idea? Really? They have no responsiblity? That's not state-sponsoring it? That's exactly what state sponsoring is.Afghanistan was a scapegoat. If the USG sincerely cared about ending terrorism, it would have sanctioned Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Egypt. But since they are official allies, which also do a bit of our secret torturing for us, they are outside the law. And thanks to WikiLeaks, we know it to be a fact: "Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." -Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
In a reception room at a Taliban ministry of defense building in Kabul, a brightly colored map depicting the American military presence in the Arabian peninsula was painted on a wall. An identical map appears in a book written by Osama bin Laden declaring a holy war on the United States. . . .and the location of the camps? In fact, the camps were deep in Taliban territory.
One of the primary reasons Mr. bin Laden exerted so much influence over Afghanistan was clearly his relationship with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the one-time clerk who rose to become spiritual leader of the Taliban, which sealed control over most of Afghanistan after taking over Kabul in 1996.
Insiders say Mullah Omar and Mr. bin Laden spent many hours in deep discussion of the intricacies of Islam, often by the light of kerosene lamps in the hideouts both men resorted to as the world's pressures against them mounted. Mr. bin Laden played to the mullah's vanity by declaring him caliph, a title reserved through the 1,400-year history of Islam for the leader of the faithful.
In turn, the Taliban leader turned his back on most of the rest of the world to support his patron. . . .
Mr. bin Laden swore "bayat," an Islamic oath of fealty, to Mullah Omar. By January of this year, at the wedding of one of his sons, the terrorist leader began to call Mullah Omar the caliph.
In return, the Taliban leader provided a base and protection for Al Qaeda, Mr. bin Laden's organization, and assented as Mr. bin Laden sent out videotapes calling on Muslims worldwide to commit their sons and their money to the terrorist camps he established in the remote deserts and mountains of Afghanistan . . .
Not all of the Arabs, Pakistanis and others who went to Afghanistan to fight were members of Al Qaeda, but those who were received special treatment as the royalty of terrorism.
Residents of Kabul complained this week that they lived under a virtual occupation by Arabs and Pakistanis during the Taliban's rule. They described thousands of Pakistanis and Arabs roaming the streets of the city as an elite that enforced its own strict moral and religious code on the population. . . .
As the power of Mr. bin Laden and his network grew, so did the rumors. Commanders of the rebel Northern Alliance said Mullah Omar had turned into a puppet of the terrorist leader. . .
Along with the personal bond between the two men, there was the Taliban's deepening financial dependence on Mr. bin Laden, whose fortune may have run dry in the 1990's but who remained a conduit for millions of dollars donated to his cause through charities and front organizations by wealthy Saudis and other Arabs. . . .
The money built hospitals and training camps for terrorists, and, intelligence officials said, bought weapons for the Taliban and the Arabs and other Muslims who flocked to Afghanistan. . . .
But items left in the ministry building and houses occupied by Al Qaeda members showed that the Taliban government aided the terrorist network's operations inside Afghanistan.
Documents showed that Al Qaeda was closely integrated with the Taliban Ministry of Defense in the field. . . .
General's account of killing a Japanese soldier: A technical sergeant in an advanced area some weeks ago complained that he had been with combat forces in the Pacific for over two years and never had a chance to do any fighting himself - that he would like the chance to kill at least one Jap before he went home. He was invited to out on a patrol into enemy territory.Sept. 9, 1944 :
The sergeant saw no Jap to shoot, but members of the patrol took a prisoner. The Jap prisoner was brought to the sergeant with the statement that here was his opportunity to kill a Jap.
"But I can't kill that man! He's a prisoner. He's defenseless."
"Hell, this is war. We'll show you how to kill the son of a bitch."
One of the patrol members offered the Jap a cigarette and a light, and as he started to smoke an arm was thrown around his head and his throat was "slit from ear to ear."
The entire procedure was thoroughly approved by the general giving the account. I was regarded with an attitude of tolerant scorn and pity when I objected to the method and said that if we had to kill a prisoner I thought we ought to do it in a decent and civilized way. "The sons of bitches do it to us. It's the only way to handle them."
Before the bodies in the hollow were "bulldozed over," the officer said, a number of our Marines went in among them, searching through their pockets and prodding around in their mouths for gold-filled teeth. Some of the Marines, he said, had a little sack in which they collected teeth with gold fillings. The officer said he had seen a number of Japanese bodies from which an ear or nose had been cut off. "Our boys cut them off to show their friends in fun, or to dry and take back to the States when they go. We found one Marine with a Japanese head. He was trying to get the ants to clean the flesh off the skull, but the odor got so bad we had to take it away from him." It is the same story everywhere I go.I'm not finding it now, but I believe Lindbergh expressed the though that such behavior by U.S. troops was a reason for the fierce resistance in the Japanese defense of the Pacific islands.
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posted by Tomorrowful at 4:06 PM on January 20, 2011 [16 favorites]